University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Undergraduate Humanities Forum 2010-2011: Penn Humanities Forum Undergraduate Virtuality Research Fellows 4-2011 "Thus play I in one person many people:" Performing Kingship in Richard II Rachel Cohen University of Pennsylvania Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/uhf_2011 Cohen, Rachel, ""Thus play I in one person many people:" Performing Kingship in Richard II" (2011). Undergraduate Humanities Forum 2010-2011: Virtuality. 1. https://repository.upenn.edu/uhf_2011/1 Suggested Citation: Cohen, R. (2011). "'Thus play I in one person many people:' Performing Kingship in Richard II." 2010-2011 Penn Humanities Forum on Virtuality. This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/uhf_2011/1 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. "Thus play I in one person many people:" Performing Kingship in Richard II Comments Suggested Citation: Cohen, R. (2011). "'Thus play I in one person many people:' Performing Kingship in Richard II." 2010-2011 Penn Humanities Forum on Virtuality. This other is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/uhf_2011/1 "Thus play I in one person many people:" Performing Kingship in Richard II Rachel Cohen 2010–2011 Penn Humanities Forum Undergraduate Mellon Research Fellowship Cohen 1 “Textual histories are nevertheless histories, and revision, elisions, suppressions, accretions are essential elements of drama by its very nature…” --Stephen Orgel, Impersonations (54) Radically different versions of Shakespeare’s plays have always existed due to the various purposes the texts have served: to stage a performance, to capture a performance retrospectively, or to create a posthumous literary canon. However, for three hundred years, scholars cleaned up and conflated variant editions of Shakespeare’s plays to create composite texts meant to approximate a hypothetical original manuscript.